How has it happened that at this moment of history, large numbers of young people have come to associate exposure to dissenting views with suffering an injury so egregious that it requires university administrators and professors to respond by publicly validating the wound and stamping out further expressions of dissent?
The best explanation can be found in a recent Atlantic cover story by constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Titled "The Coddling of the American Mind," the article traces the unprecedented fragility of today's college students to the attitudes of their parents and schools about safety. Consistently taught that the world is a perilous place — with everyone and everything from sexual predators, playground bullies, and hit-and-run drivers to monkey bars and peanut butter threatening to inflict damage or injury — young people have learned the following lesson: "Life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well."
Growing up in an era of ideological polarization and reared on social media from a formative age, young people today have also learned that disagreements are often rancorous — and that comfort can be found in forming communities of the likeminded that define themselves against outsiders. (Talk among the Yale protesters about how their residential college should serve as a "place of comfort and home," rather than an "intellectual space," seems to follow from this model of social-media interaction.)
The point is that the protesters didn't spring into existence out of nothing. Their preferences and convictions aren't self-evidently true. And they aren't giving voice to common sense. They are thinking and feeling a certain way, and making specific demands, because of how they were raised — by their parents, by their schools, and by their culture.
By our culture.
We made them this way.
This should give all of us pause — and not only because, as Lukianoff and Haidt point out, today's student activists could well grow up to become miserable adults suffering from acute anxiety and depression.
It should also trouble us because of the likely civic consequences.
Can a liberal democracy thrive if a good portion of its citizens embrace the blatantly illiberal proposition that freedom of thought and tolerance of dissent are incompatible with human flourishing and should therefore berepressed?
A corollary of the American myth of spontaneous self-generation is the view that any and all human beings, if given a free choice, would choose to live as we do, to abide by liberal democratic norms and institutions. But this, too, is a fiction. The truth is that liberal democratic citizens need to be made, and then they need to be reproduced, cultivated. (If the failures of our multiple democratization projects in the Middle East and South Asia over the past 14 years haven't taught us both how essential and how monumentally difficult this task often is, I don't know what would.)
The United States is a liberal democracy that is producing significant numbers of citizens who do not think and act like citizens of a liberal democracy.
If the trend continues and spreads, it will not end well.
A wise man once wrote: "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." Striking and maintaining the right balance between absolutism and relativism, confident self-advocacy and intellectual humility can be a tricky business. Achieving it is indeed a mark of civilized life.
But it is also a precondition for liberal citizenship, which demands that people stand up for what they believe in while simultaneously remaining alive to the inevitable partiality of their perspective on the truth — and therefore to the possibility that someone else just might end up being right.
Toleration is the name we give to this moral and epistemological balancing act. It is the preeminently liberal virtue.
Which is why the rejection of it by so many on our college campuses — and our response to that rejection — is so important.
How can we inculcate the virtue of toleration in those who reject it? What good does that virtue serve? And how does it fit into higher education and a good human life?
http://theweek.com/articles/587967/yale-mizzou-death-liberal-toleration
The best explanation can be found in a recent Atlantic cover story by constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Titled "The Coddling of the American Mind," the article traces the unprecedented fragility of today's college students to the attitudes of their parents and schools about safety. Consistently taught that the world is a perilous place — with everyone and everything from sexual predators, playground bullies, and hit-and-run drivers to monkey bars and peanut butter threatening to inflict damage or injury — young people have learned the following lesson: "Life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well."
Growing up in an era of ideological polarization and reared on social media from a formative age, young people today have also learned that disagreements are often rancorous — and that comfort can be found in forming communities of the likeminded that define themselves against outsiders. (Talk among the Yale protesters about how their residential college should serve as a "place of comfort and home," rather than an "intellectual space," seems to follow from this model of social-media interaction.)
The point is that the protesters didn't spring into existence out of nothing. Their preferences and convictions aren't self-evidently true. And they aren't giving voice to common sense. They are thinking and feeling a certain way, and making specific demands, because of how they were raised — by their parents, by their schools, and by their culture.
By our culture.
We made them this way.
This should give all of us pause — and not only because, as Lukianoff and Haidt point out, today's student activists could well grow up to become miserable adults suffering from acute anxiety and depression.
It should also trouble us because of the likely civic consequences.
Can a liberal democracy thrive if a good portion of its citizens embrace the blatantly illiberal proposition that freedom of thought and tolerance of dissent are incompatible with human flourishing and should therefore berepressed?
A corollary of the American myth of spontaneous self-generation is the view that any and all human beings, if given a free choice, would choose to live as we do, to abide by liberal democratic norms and institutions. But this, too, is a fiction. The truth is that liberal democratic citizens need to be made, and then they need to be reproduced, cultivated. (If the failures of our multiple democratization projects in the Middle East and South Asia over the past 14 years haven't taught us both how essential and how monumentally difficult this task often is, I don't know what would.)
The United States is a liberal democracy that is producing significant numbers of citizens who do not think and act like citizens of a liberal democracy.
If the trend continues and spreads, it will not end well.
A wise man once wrote: "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." Striking and maintaining the right balance between absolutism and relativism, confident self-advocacy and intellectual humility can be a tricky business. Achieving it is indeed a mark of civilized life.
But it is also a precondition for liberal citizenship, which demands that people stand up for what they believe in while simultaneously remaining alive to the inevitable partiality of their perspective on the truth — and therefore to the possibility that someone else just might end up being right.
Toleration is the name we give to this moral and epistemological balancing act. It is the preeminently liberal virtue.
Which is why the rejection of it by so many on our college campuses — and our response to that rejection — is so important.
How can we inculcate the virtue of toleration in those who reject it? What good does that virtue serve? And how does it fit into higher education and a good human life?
http://theweek.com/articles/587967/yale-mizzou-death-liberal-toleration
